BERKELEY, Calif. & SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today at the RISC-V Summit, the RISC-V
Foundation, a non-profit corporation controlled by its members to
drive the adoption and implementation of the free and open RISC-V
instruction set architecture (ISA), honored the winners of the RISC-V
SoftCPU Contest for creating innovative FPGA based CPU implementations
targeting the RISC-V ISA.

The winners of the contest include: Charles Papon with VexRiscv in 1st
place, Antti Lukats with Engine-V in 2nd place, Changyi Gu
with PulseRain Reindeer in 3rd place and Olof Kindgren with
SERV for the Creativity prize.

“The RISC-V ISA is ushering in a new era of innovation, empowering
companies and designers around the world to develop a wide variety of
implementations that solve today’s most complex design challenges,” said
Rick O’Connor, executive director of the non-profit RISC-V Foundation.
“The RISC-V SoftCPU Contest showcased how embedded designers can easily
experiment with RISC-V implementations on FPGAs, designing novel
approaches even within a limited timeframe.”

The entries were assessed on multiple criteria, including size and
performance. While each winning entry targets a different set of tasks,
the highest scoring were designed to work well on both the 25K LUT
Microsemi IGLOO™2 or SmartFusion™2, or the 5K LUT Lattice iCE40
UltraPlus™ parts. All scoring entries are compliant with the RV32I ISA.
Notably, the smallest entry, Engine-V created by Antti Lukats, used as
little as 306 x LUT4s in the ultra-low resource design.

RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) is a free and open ISA enabling a new
era of processor innovation through open standard collaboration. Founded
in 2015, the RISC-V Foundation comprises more than 200 members building
the first open, collaborative community of software and hardware
innovators powering a new era of processor innovation. Born in academia
and research, RISC-V ISA delivers a new level of free, extensible
software and hardware freedom on architecture, paving the way for the
next 50 years of computing design and innovation.

The RISC-V Foundation, a non-profit corporation controlled by its
members, directs the future development and drives the adoption of the
RISC-V ISA. Members of the RISC-V Foundation have access to and
participate in the development of the RISC-V ISA specifications and
related HW / SW ecosystem. More information can be found at www.riscv.org.